Month: November 2018
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Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
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Open Thread, 11/19/2018
I figure I should post the “Open Thread” sooner than later since people are using last week’s “Open Thread” to post stuff. So I’m getting a copy of Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones tomorrow according to Amazon. But I have a legitimate reason to get this book: we’ll be talking…
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Brown Pundits Podcast #2 – Asia Bibi and Colorism
The latest BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. The title makes it clear what we talked about this week. It as a long podcast…
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Trader Joe’s Yuzu and Habanero Hot Sauce
Normally I get hot sauces from specialty shops. But now and then I buy brands at supermarkets. So I saw two hot sauces at Trader Joe’s, yuzu sauce, and a habanero sauce. I don’t buy habanero sauces that have carrot juice, and this one did not. In general, I’d say it’s a pretty generic product,…
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The creation of Islam in Late Antiquity
Periodically people ask me my opinion of Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire. I don’t have an opinion because I haven’t read it. Many years ago I took an interest in the topic of Islamic revisionism, and from what I can…
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Random and inevitable forces in world history: the 6th century
In Science Anne Gibbons reports on new ice-core evidence for why the middle of the 6th century A.D. was so difficult in much of Europe: Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious…
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Patterns of genetic diversity within Africa
The violin-plot above is from a new preprint, Runs of Homozygosity in sub-Saharan African populations provide insights into a complex demographic and health history. Here’s the abstract: The study of runs of homozygosity (ROH), contiguous regions in the genome where an individual is homozygous across all sites, can shed light on the demographic history and…
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The 20,000 year adventur eof the
The great adventure of the Native AmericansComanche warriors in 19th century TexasIn 1492 Christopher Columbus made definitive and lasting contact between Europe and the New World. This was not the first contact. We know for a fact that Greenland Norse…
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The genetics of Native Americans
This week, Spencer and Razib talk about the history and genetics of the Native Americans. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/ovEQFyCr
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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 7: the genetics of Native Americans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 7: the genetics of Native AmericansAncient BeringiansThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss the genetics and history of Native Americans, from the icy shore…
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Indian culture started when the British arrived: tales of shadology
When looking at Google Scholar after reading the paper on South Asian pigmentation, I came across this work, The Unfair Selection: A Study on Skin Color Bias in Arranged Indian Marriages: Underlying the growing popularity of skin-lightening or fairness cosmetics in India is one of the most baseless biases experienced and practiced. Yet, the overriding…
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Skin color of South Asian groups
A massive new review, Shades of complexity: New perspectives on the evolution and genetic architecture of human skin, pointed me to another paper on South Asian skin color, The influences of genes, the environment, and social factors on the evolution of skin color diversity in India. I was very interested because South Asians have been…
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The golden age of pigmentation is yet to come
Skin color is important and interesting. It is important because people think it is important. Humans often classify each other by complexion, and it has a high social importance in many cultures. This tendency starts at a very young age. When my children are toddlers they’ve all misidentified photographs of black American males with a…
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Open Thread, 11/12/2018
Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind is an interesting book. Very much on the side of Erasmus. Like the author, I do think Erasmus turned out to be a beautiful loser. But ideas and biographies can have second acts. How the GOP Gave Up on Porn. Basically, the war was…
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A Kimura Age to the Kern-Hahn Era: neutrality & selection
I’m pretty jaded about a lot of journalism, mostly due to the incentives in the industry driven by consumers and clicks. But Quanta Magazine has a really good piece out, Theorists Debate How ‘Neutral’ Evolution Really Is. It hits all the right notes (you can listen to one of the researchers quoted, Matt Hahn, on…
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Selection for rs3827760 at EDAR (“shovel-shaped” incisor SNP) during Holocene around the “Ring of Fire”
If you have been reading my blog will you be familiar with the SNP rs3827760 within the EDAR gene. This mutation has high derived frequencies in East Asians and is associated with a suite of physical characteristics. Most famously, the thickness of hair shaft and “shovel-shaped” incisors (a phenotype also found in Neanderthals). So the…
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The visual world economy
The World’s 10 Largest Economies by GDP (1960-Today) via @VisualCappic.twitter.com/29KiDBuPnO — Carl Zha (@CarlZha) November 8, 2018 The depiction of the change in the top 10 economies over the last 60 years in the above graph is pretty mesmerizing. It tells you so much without the recourse to narrative description. Below is a Google chart…
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Rice culture reduces individualism
The above map comes from a 2014 paper, Large-scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture. From the abstract: Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more…
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Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act on Affirmative Action
Three comments 1 – He was relatively fair. I mean you knew what talking points he was going to deploy and what his conclusion was going to be. 2 – Minhaj is very American. A particular sort of American. Though the episode focuses on “Asian Americans”, Minhaj sounds like he was birthed out of The Daily…
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Sequence the thousands and your eyes shall be open
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species as an audacious work that birthed a whole discipline. But it had its failings. In particular, Darwin famously lacked the Mendelian model of genetic inheritance which easily maintained variation from generation to generation. The reason that variation is important is that it is one of the major raw materials…